Three of the 10 Best Picture nominees at this year’s Oscars cost $10M or less to make

No thank you! I'm not spending my limited free time watching some cut rate flick where nothing blows up and there's no box off star. I want to be entertained...and by that I mean go big or go home.

Which is why F1 better win Best Picture and Brad Pitt the Top Dog Actor Award...or I'm going to get involved.

Three of the 10 Best Picture nominees at this year’s Oscars cost $10M or less to make

Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, pundits will be looking towards the historic inclinations of Hollywood’s illustrious voting body to predict which of the year’s movies will win across the major categories, not least of all Best Picture.

And while there’s a few apparent trends that point to what kind of nominees tend to get the gold — like accumulating accolades at other awards ceremonies, studio prestige, and a compelling “comeback” narrative, to name a few — one thing that might not be such a strong indicator of performance on the night is how much a movie cost to make.

Having recently been brought into the spotlight by the unprecedented cost of a certain advertising campaign, media reports collated by 𝗉𝖾𝗈𝗉𝗅𝖾.𝖼𝗈𝗆 found that racing flick “F1” had the largest production budget of any of this year’s Best Picture nominees at an estimated $250 million — almost double that of the nominee with the second-biggest production costs, “One Battle After Another.”

Although these figures are not inclusive of marketing budgets (for which People also estimates that “F1” likely had the highest of any nominee, at $100 million), three of the 10 nominees have estimated budgets equal to or less than $10 million — pretty small by Hollywood’s standards.

Buy the stars

It’s no secret that big budget blockbusters aren’t exactly Oscars bait.

Looking back on all Academy Award Best Picture nominees since 1990, based on data compiled by Axios, almost 80% of these had estimated production budgets of $100 million or less when adjusted for inflation — with over half costing less than $50 million in current US dollars, and just 14 movies in total costing over $200 million to make.